Professor Sophie Ratcliffe

I work on the intersections of literature, philosophy, history and creative criticism. Much of my research focuses on the nineteenth-century but my research interests, and my teaching, extend into the twentieth, and twenty-first century literature, and I enjoy working with undergraduates and graduates in all these areas.

I’m interested in ideas of emotion, the history of how we read, and how books shape feelings, and this is what drove my first book On Sympathy (OUP, 2008). I am currently completing a book about children and libraries which was funded by a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship. Other works include my creative critical book about reading and grief - The Lost Properties of Love (2019), published in the USA in 2024 as Loss, A Love Story. 

My authoritative edition of P.G. Wodehouse’s Letters was reissued in 2025 by Penguin Books.

I regularly review fiction and non-fiction for the national press, and was a judge for the 2016 Baillie Gifford Prize and the 2017 Wellcome Prize.

At LMH, I have the highly enjoyable task of working and thinking with undergraduate students right at the start of their degree. I lead the classes and tutorials for Prelims Paper 3: Literature in English 1830-1910, Paper 4: Literature in English 1910-Present Day, and Paper 1: Introduction to Literature. 

At the Faculty, you will find me teaching, lecturing and supervising on ideas such as Victorian Material Culture, Life Writing, and Emotion in Postmodern writing. My lectures touch on many authors including Dickens, Trollope, Browning, Braddon, Joyce, Beckett, Auden, Bishop, Geoffrey Hill, Amis, Ali Smith, Zadie Smith and Eileen Myles. 

Courses:

English Language and Literature

Classics and English

English and Modern Languages